1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a platform for building and delivering highly distributed heterogeneous component-based Web applications. Applications are delivered from the “edge” of the Internet, e.g., by content delivery networks and reverse proxy caches. The platform can be used to deliver both traditional Web applications and Web services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's web sites and application builders face an ever-increasing number of challenges. Chief among them are the following: performance, scalability, reliability, security, ease of deployment and management, openness, and cost. In particular, applications have to support large numbers of requests per second, without increasing request latency. Applications have to be able to scale to meet peak demands. Unexpected hardware, software, and Internet failure issues have to be dealt with. The access to enterprise applications and data must be strictly controlled. It must be easy to deploy and manage applications across multiple servers. Application developers do not want to be locked in into vendor-specific standards. Applications have to be built, deployed, and managed in a cost-effective manner. The emerging field of Web Services will quickly face the very same challenges.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) and caches are designed to help with some of these problems. Unfortunately, there is currently no comprehensive programming model available that would address all of the above challenges. ESI (http://www.edge-delivery.org/spec.html) is the first standard for doing this, but it only addresses the presentation layer of the Web application.
It would be desirable to extend ESI to let developers build and deploy complete Web sites, applications, and services.